Good-Neighborly Bases

Out in the blue Pacific, plunk on the Equator, the U.S. now has an outlying bastion to protect the Panama Canal. Last week the State Department told how the U.S. had acquired military rights on the fabled, sultry, barren Galapagos Islands, long coveted by military strategists of many nations--and especially Japan. Also acquired from the owner, Ecuador, is another base on Santa Elena peninsula, Ecuador's westernmost tip, commanding the entrance to Ecuador's strategic Guayaquil Gulf. These new military outposts form a protective bastion within radius of 785 to 1,000 miles guarding the western approaches to the Panama Canal.

Establishment of the bases, under a Good Neighbor agreement, had the hearty endorsement of Ecuador's liberal, hemisphere-minded President Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Rio. The U.S. had been negotiating for them since 1940, last year granted a $500,000 RFC loan for the "commercial improvement" of Albermarle Island, largest of the Galapagos group. (Navy-minded Franklin Roosevelt cruised among the islands on the U.S.S. Houston in 1938.)

Thus the Galapagos, first discovered in 1535, once again make history. For several centuries they were a famed stopping place for buccaneers and whalers, who took along the islands' giant (400 Ib.) tortoises for fresh meat, and set up a primitive post office (in a barrel) which still provides free mail delivery. In 1835 they made scientific history: Charles Darwin visited them, found that half of the islands' birds and flowers had no counterparts elsewhere, gathered data that later gave him the idea for his Origin of Species.

Cooled by the Humboldt Current, the islands are not as hot as might be expected. Mists shroud the tops of the 2,000 volcanic crater cones that splotch the group's 2,800 square miles; on all but the shore the climate is humid. The handful of inhabitants, mostly Ecuadorians and Scandinavians, grow coffee and sugar cane, raise cattle on the craters' slopes. In the '30s, the islands became famed in U.S. Sunday supplements because of a bizarre free-love colony founded by a German dentist, which came to an unhappy end with the violent deaths of four members.

Work on the bases has already begun. Building an airfield on the rough terrain would be a major engineering job, but there are sheltered coves for seaplanes, good anchorages for ships. The workers and sailors will have to import water; on Albermarle, which has almost no fresh water, the ranchers and cattle hands drink coconut juices, wash in salt water.

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